New Junon
by greenjudy
Summary: Post-AC, and in a sketchy way, post DoC. A meditation on trust.
1. Chapter 1: Prakesh

I recognize the shoulder line, first: his back is turned to me, there's a band of bright daylight from the window on the floor in front of the table where he's drinking with a couple of other guys. I'm on my way over to order a drink from the bar and this is what I see out of the corner of my eye.

_Weirdness._

I steal a glance as I cross Tseng's line of sight, and we lock eyes: big mistake.

The first thing I feel is shock, a kind of shock on his behalf, and I wish I could take myself right out of there, rewind and back up and get all the way out of town; do it over, come back from my gig in Corel and get back out of the helicopter and walk into little _Morning Snack_ instead of this place, the derelict and sour-smelling _Argot Flower._

Based on my own experience, you get that waxy complexion around day three of the bender. His eyes are charcoal smudges, his expression too complex to parse, but way down deep under the hunger and the fatigue and the exultant darkness, I catch it, a signal, the _real_ reason I should never have looked.

_You're about to break his cover, Reno, you stupid fuck. _

It's too late to fake my way past this moment. It's too clear that we know each other. Tseng's drinking buddies perk up a little. Throughout most of Old Midgar, neither of us could have pulled this off; we cut too high a profile, Shinra flacks, big boys in the playground.

But this isn't Old Midgar; this is New Junon.

"Prakesh," one of Tseng's buddies says. Tseng shakes his head slightly. Greasy strands of hair slip across his face.

"Prakesh, you got a problem?" the other one asks.

The other one _is_ the problem.

See, we don't need it anymore, the drug that was marketed as a way to slow the effects of Geostigma. We don't need it, but—hey, this is weird—we kind of do _need_ it, now more than ever. And the poppy fields of ruined Mideel and the sketchy shipping regulations covering maritime freight out of Costa Del Sol—we need those, too. You see how this works? A brand-new Golden Triangle. With New Junon as the hypoteneuse: Shit Central.

And _this_ guy, unless I'm deeply mistaken, is Parvel Har, the one guy in this town you just don't want to meet, New Junon's custodial consigliere.

It all comes together in one shiny-bright instant of Reno clarity.

_Fuck me, what have I done?_

It's too late to fake around the eye contact, so we prolong it.

Tseng blinks, once.

Either I have my gut instinct on how to fix this, or I have nothing. My next move will set him up as the Lizard King or it will get him eviscerated.

"Long time no see," I say, "baby."

He's on his feet all of a sudden. I keep his friends in my peripheral vision as clear as I can; they are watching speculatively as he pushes the little round table back with his foot, crossing in front of the big one to confront me. I recognize the remains of the subdued pinstripe suit, the shirtsleeves rolled, the pants rumpled and stained.

I let him grab me one-handed, by the lapel of my suit jacket. His free hand reaches toward my face. He runs a thumb across the scar under my left eye, the touch hard and sure.

There is no way to communicate past the roles we play. All we've got is the now, and my desperate hope that I haven't just burned my boss to the ground.

Tseng draws me in – his hands ice cold – jams his tongue into my mouth, and grinds his hips into mine.

_Don't, _I think, _don't lose it –_ _ride – _

I ride it, the ferocity of his kiss, his tongue cold and wet in my mouth, I feel the involuntary shudder, starting in him, traveling to me, note in passing with a shocked corner of my brain that he is erect; I gasp into his mouth, feel his weight shift, feel his hands twitch, and now I know what's coming, I got it through skin contact, through breath and pressure and the touch of his tongue and his erection. He grips me, hard; yet I feel him relax, just a little, for he knows, we both know, we can't fake _anything_ about this moment, see–

The blow takes me just under the ribs, lifts me off my feet, tosses me on my can.

Tseng, his face blank, kicks me back into the corner.

I hear snorts of laughter coming from his table.

"Fuck me silly, Prakesh, no idea you was a queer, man," says Parvel Har.

The other one chortles.

"Aw, man! Have to call Animal Sam, have him swap the bitches we got you for a couple of assboys. Holy shit, Prakesh, you ain't just a assfucker, you a _crazy_ assfucker."

I roll onto my side, and throw up.


	2. Chapter 2: woven bone

Tell the truth, I have to be careful.

Hojo used to joke about it. I guess he saw it happening in the SOLDIER ranks first; those guys got different injections than we did. That casual dependence on materia made it kind of easy to forget the stuff you'd see—not every time, not every guy, but out of nowhere it'd happen, this stunning episode of mako poisoning, and the poor, lucky bastard? He'd be fucked.

_The Cure,_ Hojo used to say, _is definitely worse than the disease. _

I took the point, took my chances. I took them for years, along with everyone else.

And then, after Meteor, after Geostigma, after all hell broke loose with those Deepground fuckers, our resources got scarce, we all kind of did without for awhile, chewed stim gum and girded up our loins and rode out the pain; and somewhere in that enforced hiatus from the mako my neurochemistry turned. I'm sure I never felt the original failure, but one day I went into WRO's medlab for a booster shot and had a seizure, the real deal, complete with sparkle-vision: I close to bit off my tongue.

A bad night or a seizure? Well, that's a pretty easy call.

--

There's a quick occasional strobe of ruby-colored light through the filmy once-white curtains that cover the window beside my bed. I'm up on the third floor of the Little Destiny Inn, with a view of the backstairs and a trashcan alley I figure I might need to slither down into, if my luck continues to hold.

I get my shirt unbuttoned and let it drop to the floor. My left ear is still ringing and that whole side of my face is starting to swell, but it's the Reno insides I'm pondering. Not that I have a lab to tell, but I do figure meaningful contusions, possibly some internal bleeding. I make a rib to be broken, or badly cracked at any rate; it hurts to breathe.

Now I've got an ice pack in one hand, a medicinal shot glass in the other, with a whiskey bottle that I bought from the hotel tavern downstairs already rolling around in the bed; idea is to inch my way under the beat-up bedspread without altering the angle of my torso, dose myself without mercy, and hope for about nine hours of uninterrupted sleep.

_Original_ idea was to stay one, maybe two nights in Junon, long enough to pick up transportation to Costa del Sol, where I could catch up with my mark again, a fairly easy piece of work, as the guy is not exactly covering his tracks, although moving faster and avoiding a few more killings would certainly have been a plan.

Rufus, who sicced me on the mark, didn't say shit to me about any Eric Tseng operation unfolding in Junon Harbor.

It's not going to occur to me for another several hours to wonder why.

--

It's oh-dark thirty when I hear my latch give; I open my eyes and watch my door open, watch a man's shape slip through, in ruby-light.

Oh, man.

"You shouldn't be here," I tell Eric Tseng.

I fumble for and click the remote, bring the room lights up low. He's stripping off his jacket, tossing it toward the bed. It slides down the slick, fireproof surface of the comforter and puddles on the floor, collar and cuffs shiny and worn.

Tseng is coming toward the bed. He hasn't been bathing: I smell him, hair and sweat and skin, a specific, sweet-sour range of smells that belong to him alone, that under ordinary circumstances I would never, ever experience.

"Serious," I say finally. "Maybe they followed you. Or bugged me. I have no idea if there's a room in this town that's safe from Parvel Har."

"Reno, where was your intel?"

His eyes are glittering. His voice is steady. He sounds pretty rational, but I know the look in his eye, know the glassiness. Now he's pulling something from his pocket, a fragment of what looks to my eyes like a piece of chalky mineral in a zip-locked bag. He's crumbling some of it in his fingers, and I feel a strange displacement of air, then a fizzy warmth, ghostly pressure on my skin, a touch before the touch. His hand makes contact with my chest.

"There wasn't any," I say.

Tseng massages the mineral dust, or whatever it is, into my skin, doesn't spare any pressure for the rib.

"I'm on my way to Costa Del Sol, I'm—argh!—tailing that weird new Corel-based motherfucker for Rufus, guy they're calling the Breather? Had no idea you were here," I gasp, as the stuff Tseng is rubbing into my bruises begins to work. Whatever this is, it is not mundane stuff.

I guess he reads my mind.

"Osteoblast inducer," he says. "Very pure, fast-acting. May not be—" he laughs shortly—"very comfortable while it's working. What do you mean, there was no intel?"

"Rufus…Rufus didn't tell me you were here," I manage to say. "I was trying to get transport – why? Why didn't he tell me?"

"Didn't you," Tseng says quietly, "do some housekeeping for Reeve, recently?"

We look at each other for a second.

"Some light housekeeping," I concede.

"Maybe," Tseng says, "there's something he doesn't want Reeve to know."

"Almost got you killed," I point out. "Eric, what is this crazy fucking operation?"

"As soon as you can travel," he says evenly, not meeting my eyes, "I want you to get out of town. I don't care where. Don't tell Rufus you saw me. Don't…don't tell Reeve."

"Eric—"

His hands press down on my ribcage. My vision blurs.

"Agh! Fuck! Ow!" I try to get out of his grip, but he puts his thumb on my broken rib, and I suck in my breath. "What _is_ this stuff?"

"It's a mozo derivative," he says, his voice grainy with fatigue. "Not mako-based, not directly at any rate. It's…" He glances down at his hands, powdery with the drug, lightly haloed. "It's not going to trigger you, Reno."

Tseng, it seems, knows all about my seizure at the WRO labs.

I try making a little noise like laughter to cover up my embarrassment. It hurts.

"Mozo derivative? Cute. I've always wanted to try that stuff," I wheeze. "Maybe not on a broken rib."

"Junon boys," Tseng muses, sliding a thumb savagely between the bottom rib and its messed-up neighbor and making me writhe, "have taken to calling it woven bone."

"You're telling me these Junon boys are aspiring poets, or something?" I let out another laugh, more like a squawk. It hurts like fuck, and I shut up.

"It accelerates the overall healing process," Tseng says, "knits bone, does a few other things. There's a narcotic in the compound."

"Yeah, I think I noticed," I tell him.

"Get flat," he says, "let me work." I pull away to stare at him.

"No," I say, shaky, "don't. Leave the stuff with me, get out of here, they're probably tracing you to the hotel right now. Leave it. I can do this."

He leans into me. I watch his hand sink deep into my abdomen, and then I can't get my breath at all.

--

What he's doing to me, I have not got words to describe.

One of his hands is underneath me, supporting the small of my back while he works. I can feel the fingers of his other hand curling under my ribcage, and then he rocks them inward, angling toward my spine. There's a lot of contused, traumatized tissue, and some muscles in there—I think of them as back muscles—that he's inserting his fingers into through my stomach, from the front.

He cups the back hand, I arch away from it into the front hand, and the room spins.

"A little more," he grunts, and his hair brushes my cheek as he leans across me.

I can't answer. His fingers track fire across my psoas muscles. He has climbed onto the bed, is balancing on top of me, holding me down with the weight of his legs. I'm biting the sheet to keep from screaming.

"Just a little more," Tseng whispers, his mouth against my ear.

Bone-edges shift and meet. I cry out through clenched teeth, and he says my name.

He releases the pressure gradually. We are both breathing hard.

Tseng shakes his head, once, like he's trying to wake up. His skin is grayish and shiny with sweat. I'm jelly, nerveless, underneath him. I don't know what time it is. I don't know how long he's been here.

His eyes are closing. He holds himself up one arm, precarious over me, for a few long seconds.

"This was stupid," I whisper, finally. "This was _stupid._ Coming here was too dangerous. You've got to go right now. Get the fuck out of here."

He doesn't speak.

He waits another second. Then he reaches out one hand—still dusty, shimmering with woven bone—and strokes the bruised side of my face.


	3. Chapter 3: perspective

Alcohol is tech. It's a tool. Not, mind you, a very refined tool. Don't tackle a server with a fifth of vodka. But it is an effective bludgeon: it gets you out of the way, lets the truth have its day, and take its toll.

I made sure I was drunk that afternoon. I didn't know, or maybe better to say I didn't let myself know what I was preparing for, but I was pretty sure it needed alcohol to do. I picked a pale beer, expensive, not my usual drink; I took my cool new Turks wages and performed an upgrade.

Life, like me, was new; the beer, the scarred hardwood table, the afternoon light, everything held its own, it all was like me: tough and willing and good, good enough. The exhilaration of it, of knowing it, I thought, might kill me.

"What do you want?" I asked him.

He turned his head to glance at me.

"Perspective."

I took a sip of my spectacular lager, turned his word over, the sound of it.

"You saying," I asked finally, "you don't have perspective?"

A shrug, the lightest gesture.

"Don't worry about it," he said.

"You'd be surprised," I told him, "the things I worry about."

Tseng cracked a smile.

"You seem…pretty carefree from where I'm sitting, Mister Reno."

"I seem a lot of things, I bet." We locked eyes, then both turned to our beers, thought about that for a minute.

"S'a word," I said, "with a lot of meanings, perspective." And when he didn't answer, I started to get to the point. "You can't…you can't see around corners. Nobody can see around corners or figure every angle for sure. Maybe you don't need more light or sharper eyes, man."

Tseng's expression didn't change much—just a touch heavier-lidded than usual, and a little flush riding his skin. I found myself staring at his lips.

"Maybe you need a rest from knowing everything," I said.

We were approaching the point now. Converging. A meeting, I thought, feeling the afternoon light on my throat, an unimaginable meeting: Tseng, and me, and the truth.

"Maybe I do," Tseng said.

I looked down at my beer, breathed, said the thing I was there to say.

"Well, maybe I can help with that."

Tseng leaned forward, elbows on the bar, dipping his head just for a second. I couldn't see his face through the fall of hair, black and perfectly cut. When he straightened up, he had on a different smile.

"I'll look forward to your Six tomorrow," he said. "Try to get it to Marilee before the steno pool goes home." The Six, known in Turks circles as "the Shinra Self-Ream," is post-incident reportage required by the liability geezers when we trash municipal infrastructure, offend ambassadors, or spill the wrong guy's blood.

"My Six..? I blew it? Wait, what the fuck, you were _happy…" _

Tseng slid his beautiful old leather wallet out of his coat pocket, counted out bills.

"This one, Reno," he said, "is on me."

--

They refuse to admit it, even the guys at Cosmo Canyon, but the afternoon light has not been the same since Meteor fell. It's not like that anymore.

It will never be like that again, I guess.

--

I spend the whole day after Tseng came riding woven bone.

One thing Tseng neglected to mention about osteoblast inducers is the aggressive way they empty your sinuses, your stomach, your bladder, your intestines; you name it, it's coming out.

First trip to the bathroom was undertaken more or less crawling, and I stay there for over an hour, making a mess.

Then come the pretty pictures, and we segue from impressive multicolored lightshows—like firework cascades—to some almost comical stock bad trip imagery. After the luminous crocodile I just curl up in the fetal position, trying not to howl aloud, and wonder if woven bone eats brain cells.

I finally fall asleep somewhere around 11 AM, and wake at nightfall to cold, wet sheets and dry heaves—I don't dare take any whiskey in this state—and find, to my surprise, that I am able to stand. My mouth tastes like dead leaves.

"Yo, zombie," I say to my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

--

So day comes. You drag yourself out of the Little Destiny, shaking and not quite upright. You order some black coffee at the joint the fishermen's wives frequent, regret it, make a charge for the men's room. Food is absolutely out of the question; looking at the cherry pie is making you nauseous. You tip lavishly, apologize, move on quick.

You go do a little shopping; grubby Turk-blue won't work for this gig, it barely passed muster last night, when you must have appeared, through the fisheye lens of Parvel Har and his guys, to be an eccentric love choice, to say the least.

New Junon is not a fashionable resort-type town, but stuff is starting to surface, convenient furnishings for the aspiring consigliere; a few of those boys favor boys, and a few of _those _boys know how to dress the part.

You've got hold of something like the right stuff now, the right equipment for your new role, a pale linen suit with sharp lapels, a pair of butter-colored leather shoes retrieved from a dumpster; you're aiming for gutter kid with good taste, which is not that far from the truth.

The shoes, the black eye, the fey white scarf knotted around your neck, are telling a story: lad lost at sea, hull-breached.

You need the story to be right, not just the suit.

Because there's no question what you now have to do.

--

Morning Snack, it turns out, has an old upright Acrosonic in the back parlor. Beat down, a little out of tune, it has surprisingly good action; I guess we have a few things in common, and the proprietor of the Snack signs me on for a time, pending some obscure personal yardstick of income generation that the piano and I are supposed to achieve.

Here's a picture: Reno of the Turks, playing for tips in a wine bar gone to hell.

I don't care. I'll run out of stuff I know how to play in about a week. But a week is about all I've got to put a plan together, anyway.

That's my estimate for how much longer Eric's cover is going to last.


End file.
